Like weeding on the farm, testing is a necessary but unglamorous task in website development

It is not a convenient truth, but your web site looks different on every monitor, browser, and operating system combination.

When I first released Small Farm Central, I sent out an announcement to the mailing list, was listed on the ATTRA weekly newsletter, and had a news segment in the New Farm magazine, so I was getting decent traffic to the site. I started hearing complaints that the navigation was impossible to use on certain pages and other fairly major problems.

The site looked fine in the browsers I was testing in – Firefox and Internet Explorer (IE). When I finally got to the bottom of the problem, I realized I had the newest version of Internet Explorer installed and the site was badly flawed if viewed under the previous version of IE.

As a web developer, I knew that I should be testing in multiple browsers and configurations, but I allowed myself to make the mistake that if it looked good in one version of Internet Explorer it must look fine in the other versions. Wishful thinking.

It is a tough lesson to truly learn until you have a serious problem like I had when I put the first incarnation of the Small Farm Central site live.

When you use a service like Small Farm Central to develop your website 95% of the necessary testing is completed before you start working with your site, but it is still important to look at your site in different browsers to make sure there are no problems.

It is most important to test your site on as many different browsers as possible. The following image from Wikipedia shows the general distribution of browsers.

Internet Explorer (IE) users are the majority and they are about evenly split between version 6 and version 7, so it is important to test in both versions. Among web developers and web designers IE is known to be the most pernicious of browsers, so be skeptical and test in both versions. To find out what version you are using, click the help menu and then click "About" when you are in the IE browser. Find a friend with the version that you don't have because it is very difficult to have both installed on your computer at once. The services listed later in this article also help you with this.

Arugula’s Star Farm had an issue like this last week because they developed their site using Firefox and as soon as their farm was getting publicity in the local paper they noticed seemingly random fonts and text sizes in different parts of their site. We were able to fix these problems easily when the control panel was opened in Internet Explorer.

If you do not have one of the major browsers installed, you can use one the services below to view you website in multiple operating system and browser configurations. All you have to do is type in the address of your website and it will do all the work for you.
http://browsershots.org/
http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/

As a person who makes a living with web development, browser testing and the inconsistencies that cause these problems is one of the most frustrating and necessary parts of my work. Testing is never the flashy part of this work, but following up on these details is the difference between having an amateur site and a professional site that brings customers to your farm.

Photo via cyancey

It's official: ketchup is the most interesting condiment

I read an article about the wonders of ketchup a number of years ago and I have often thought back to it whenever ketchup comes up in conversation. I was glad to rediscover the article this week and spend a happy half hour retracing old intellectual territory.

My favorite non-fiction reading floats effortlessly between diverse topics and makes unexpected connections between these subjects. For me, this is a very pleasurable experience like discovering little pieces of mind candy; those two topics will be linked for as long as I can remember the story. I'll go beyond my expertise and suggest that because our brains work mainly as pattern matchers, the satisfaction of these connections is a tiny reward from our brain to encourage us to seek out more of these connections. They help us understand our world.

I see this, for example, in Michael Pollan at his best (I am thinking The Botany of Desire here), some of the Ladybug Letter articles, or a wonderful book by Robert Sapolosky, A Primate's Memoir.

The article, called The Ketchup Conundrum, is a perfect example of this type of writing. We hear about the business of food, the science of taste, and some compelling humans who are passionate about ketchup. Passion is always compelling.

There are some lessons for those of us who market food:

The rise of Grey Poupon proved that the American supermarket shopper was willing to pay more—in this case, $3.99 instead of $1.49 for eight ounces—as long as what they were buying carried with it an air of sophistication and complex aromatics. Its success showed, furthermore, that the boundaries of taste and custom were not fixed: that just because mustard had always been yellow didn't mean that consumers would use only yellow mustard.

Or there is the paragraph that will change your thoughts on ketchup forever:

There are five known fundamental tastes in the human palate: salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami. Umami is the proteiny, full-bodied taste of chicken soup, or cured meat, or fish stock, or aged cheese, or mother's milk, or soy sauce, or mushrooms, or seaweed, or cooked tomato. "Umami adds body," Gary Beauchamp, who heads the Monell Chemical Senses Center, in Philadelphia, says. "If you add it to a soup, it makes the soup seem like it's thicker—it gives it sensory heft. It turns a soup from salt water into a food." When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar—so now ketchup was also sweet—and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues. Give a baby soup, and then soup with MSG (an amino-acid salt that is pure umami), and the baby will go back for the MSG soup every time, the same way a baby will always prefer water with sugar to water alone. Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating—about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo. How many things in the supermarket run the sensory spectrum like this?

Well, I'd really like to quote the whole thing, but why don't you just go and read it?

Photo by Est Bleu2007

Presentation and tradeshow at the Eco Farm Conference

Small Farm Central is taking a trip to Pacific Grove, CA for the Eco Farm conference at the end of this week (Jan. 23-26).

On Friday, I am giving a talk on web marketing for farms. This will not be a advertisement for Small Farm Central, just a general overview of how and why to get your farm online.

Here is the description listed in the program for the talk:

Tending Technology: How to Market your Farm with New Media
The Internet can be intimidating, confusing and time consuming, but a website can be an amazing asset to your farm. New media can save time, increase your visibility in the community, create paths for communication during the off-season, and encourage contact between farm customers. Learn quick and easy techniques for successful Internet marketing with email mailing lists, websites, e-commerce, and farm blogs. Find out how tending technology can take your farm to a new level.
Presenter: Simon Huntley, Small Farm Central, Pittsburgh, PA.

I will also have a table in the tradeshow, so be sure to stop by for a chat if you will be at the conference.

Showing up - underrated, but important

Seth Godin recently wrote a terse response to the question, "What did you do to improve your web marketing in 2007?"

"I showed up.

Underrated, but important."

I was talking to Small Farm Central member last week who told me that the website exceeded expectations in the first six months of use, that customers love the site, and that he felt an increased connection to the customers. That isn't necessarily news, but the way he told me this surprised me. I got the impression that he was forced into a website by the powers that be, but now found himself on other end being quite pleased that he made the jump. Many farmers feel like they should have a website because it shows professionalism and they have heard it will help draw new customers, but it sounds like a drag on top of all the other tasks that are directly related to making a farm work.

I understand that constraint from first-hand experience and that is the reason I am bringing Small Farm Central to the community. Now it is simple and not intimidating to get your farm website started. Just choose a domain name (ie www.yourfarm.com) and within a day or two you can start writing your pages, uploading photos, and more. Do a little bit each week throughout the end of the winter and you will find yourself with a great site by the beginning of the season.

What can happen by the end of 2008 if you "show up" online? Maybe you will make sales with an e-commerce system, gain new customers through Google searches, create new alliances in the community, write a blog that will make you think about your farming enterprise in a different way or grow existing customer relationships. I can tell you that a little effort and a little patience goes a long way in web marketing.